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Abstract

When Lucy Sussex’s clever detective work revealed that the pseudonyms of W.W and Waif Wander belonged to Mary Fortune, she opened a sensational chapter in colonial literary history. Sussex has demonstrated convincingly that Fortune’s output was prodigious. The sheer volume of her writing in the Australian Journal demands recognition but it is also the quality and nature of Fortune’s contribution to the journal which make them significant. This paper will present evidence that Fortune was the author of at least one other set of writings in the Australian Journal: a series of urban observations. When this newly identified category of work is added to the works written under the pseudonyms or initials already identified by Sussex, the case for Fortune’s significance within nineteenth-century women’s writing becomes even stronger.